More D.C. book controversy coming

“Game Change” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin has touched off a debate about anonymous sourcing and the accuracy of narrative-driven political books. But the debate isn’t likely to end soon because Bob Woodward and at least two other prominent political journalists, Jonathan Alter and Ryan Lizza, have similar books about the Obama administration coming out this year.

Woodward, the capital’s foremost fly-on-the-wall chronicler of political power, is unapologetic about using anonymous sourcing to enable high-level participants to give accounts of contemporary events. “It’s the only method if you’re going to get an unlaundered version of what occurred,” he said.

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But Woodward balks at the idea that he was simply “recreating” scenes in his books. “It’s reported,” he said. “So-and-so was there and they said this. There are meeting notes and so forth.”

His new book, which he said is “going very well,” will use the same methods, and a White House official confirmed that Woodward is getting access to senior officials and will likely sit down with the president.

Alter, a Newsweek senior editor who will be first out of the gate with his Obama White House book — "The Promise: President Obama, Year One" — in May, said “the idea that you can write one of these books without using anonymous sources is erroneous.”

“Long-form journalism or works of history benefit from narrative drive,” Alter said. “Most of my scenes are quite short, but it is necessary to include some dialogue in order to take the reader as close as possible to what happened. In my reporting experience, people tend to remember quite well what the president said. I often rely on their memories if the quotations are short.”

Background sourcing can be essential, Alter said, because “you don’t want the source to be parsing every word. You want them to tell you what happened.”

Granting sources anonymity is a bargain made daily in Washington journalism, with the upside being proximity to the unvarnished truth. The downside: being spun by sources for their own purposes while under the cloak of anonymity.

“Game Change,” which has already been optioned by HBO, has a cinematic feel, complete with such controversy-courting details as a phone conversation between Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy in which Kennedy later “fumed that Clinton had said, A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

What Clinton allegedly said isn’t in quotation marks — a practice that, according to the authors' note, “reflect[s] only a lack of certainty on the part of our sources about precise wording, not about the nature of the statements.” Although it may not be precise wording, several news organizations have run it as a verbatim quote from the 42nd president to the late lion of the Senate.

Plum Line blogger Greg Sargent questioned the methodology, writing that “in cases like these, when people are hinting at racism, the precise wording is everything. And in this case, the whole claim is based on an anonymous source’s recollection that someone who has now passed away told him or her that Clinton said something like this.”

For Sargent, “this really illustrates the perils of this approach to sourcing, particularly in the current media environment.”